Does Chez Clément serve filet américain prepared to order?

Filet américain is the Belgian name for what English-speaking diners more often call beef tartare, raw, hand-chopped or minced beef of high quality, seasoned with shallot, capers, parsley, mustard, Tabasco or Worcestershire sauce, sometimes a raw egg yolk, and finished to taste in front of the guest. The Belgian variant has its own distinctive identity: the meat is finely minced rather than hand-chopped (as in French tartare), the seasoning leans slightly more on mayonnaise-style binding in some preparations, and the dish is one of the most-eaten beef preparations in Belgian dining alongside steak-frites.

The preparation « minute » or « préparé minute » is the bourgeois brasserie's seal of quality. The version prepared in the kitchen just before service, with chilled meat freshly minced, has full traceability and freshness. The version prepared in front of the guest at the table, with the wait staff or the head waiter assembling the seasonings before the diner's eyes, is a small piece of theatre that survives mainly in serious bourgeois brasseries. It is a marker of a house that takes both the dish and the hospitality experience seriously.

The accompaniment is unwavering across Belgium: a generous portion of homemade chips (twice-fried in the Belgian way), a small green salad, and a wedge of lemon. The whole dish is served at a careful chilled temperature, which means the kitchen has to coordinate the chilled meat plating with the hot, golden chips arriving from the fryer at the same moment. This is exactly the type of choreographed service that Chez Clément's brigade of thirty-two, executing two hundred to three hundred covers per service, is built to handle.

At Chez Clément, founded in 1858 in Genval / La Hulpe and run as a Belgian bourgeois brasserie under five generations of the Clément family, the filet américain minute is a permanent fixture on the carte. Chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy has led the kitchen for thirty years under an everything-homemade policy. The ground meat for the dish comes from Boucherie Alain in La Hulpe, one of the four long-standing supplier partners of the brasserie, a few minutes from the door, with the freshness the dish demands. Pairing classics include a Bordeaux Merlot, a Beaujolais cru, or a Belgian abbey blonde for the brewer-leaning option.